City of Robinson deactivates Flock cameras following security concerns

Our Take

Credit to KCEN News for catching a story that deserves way more attention than it gets: a city council actually voting unanimously to deactivate Flock Safety cameras already in operation. That's not a proposal getting tabled or a contract expiring quietly — that's elected officials looking at a live surveillance system and deciding the risk outweighs the benefit. We don't know all the technical details behind Robinson's "security concerns," but the pattern should sound familiar: these networks store sensitive location data on a private company's servers, and once that data exists, it's a target. Hacks, breaches, and unauthorized access aren't hypothetical anymore — they're a recurring headline across departments running this tech.

What makes this case notable is the unanimous vote. Flock pitches itself to city councils as a low-controversy, bipartisan crime-fighting tool, and usually that sales pitch works. When a council reverses course together, it's a signal that the gap between the marketing and the operational reality got too big to ignore. Every city weighing a Flock contract should be asking what Robinson's council apparently asked: who has access to this data, how long is it kept, and what happens when something goes wrong.

Robinson is now one data point in a growing list of towns reconsidering these deployments. Check our camera map to see if your city is running ALPRs, and visit our take-action page if you want your own council asking the same hard questions before — not after — the cameras go live.